| Summary: | 碩士 === 長庚大學 === 工商管理學系 === 99 === The purpose of this study is to investigate the determinants of hospital doctors’ new drugs prescribing behavior. This study focuses on the social determinants of physicians’ new drug adoption behavior. This studies recognizing the importance of opinion leader and colleagues in the new drug diffusion process with analyzing the prescribing behavior of new drug adopted by colleagues and consultants. Furthermore, the novelty of the drugs is considered as moderating effect.
The main argument of this research is that when a drug is in high novelty (i.e., drugs belong to the category of New Molecular Entity) physicians will be more rely on social cues to adopt this new drug. Specifically, physicians usually lack of knowledge and personal experience on a new drug, such as its curative effect, side effect or appropriate dosage. Under such an uncertain decision context and the presumed bounded rationality, physicians will rely on some simplified rule or social signals in making decisions. Contrastingly, prescribing less novel new drugs such as those in the category of New Combination of Two or More Drugs, social signals are less used.
Academically, new product adoption or technology diffusion has attracted many scholars. This study will contribute to this research stream by apply the behavioral theory in the context of personal adoption decisions. To our best knowledge, all of the published studies regarding physicians’ prescription decision are conducted by interviews or case studies. The lack of large-sample empirical evidence in pior literature leads to a unclear generalizability of their findings. Thus, our study can bridge the empirical gap by providing systematic empirical evidence in use of National Health Insurance Research Database.
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